How about advantage users get 150 kb and non advantage users get 100 kb for a entry?! +25 kb for both...cause it's a shame that's lots of quality on details is gone when you have to bring back your chop to 75 kb! Of course the advantage users will say, get the advantage! right?

Cheers!

get the advantage! right?

once I had a second place with 75kb

Correct optmization will allow you to take a 200kb image and bring it down to around 75kb without a noticable loss in qulity.

There have been several extremely detailed winning entries long before advantage came around that were around 50-60k.

Knowing how to optimize is just another great tool that many people need to learn to use more.

That's my 2 cents. But then again, I'm also the optimization police around here.

my first win was a 75k entry.... I would love to have more (even with advantage) to work with... but think of the dial-up children.... lets not forget about them

I kinda agree with dew on this, with the 550 pixels wide by 600 pixels high restriction, I don't think there is any need for larger file sizes, unless you are doing an animated gif.
..... after all this is photoshopcontest, not imagereadycontest.

Everyone should keep in mind especially the nonadvantage users, how lucky we are to have JMH hosting the photos now, because it's so much nicer than having to host your own like we used to have to do.

I wonder how much space is filled with hosted photos here on a daily basis. I think it might be kinda interesting to see some stats on that.

Yeah, I mean, if you give me an image at 550x600 at 200k, I'll easily get it down around 50-60k. Then comparing them side by side, I'll bet you can't tell the difference.

While I totally agree with you I think it would help the class if you provided an example.

Go find me a pic I'm too lazy.

Found and resized TWO for you to play with. But they're not EXACTLY 200kb or 550x600. But I think they're close enough for your example techniques.

247.99 KB at 550x367:


203.6 KB at 550x413:

Alright, uhm Dew wanna share how to optimize a 75 kb entry? My .psd files are big, if I make them .jpeg than it's like 120 kb so than I have to make it smaller to 75 kb, but most of the time lots of quality is gone! So hope you will share your wisdom with us

There's been a "Save for the Web" thread here in the past. I'm too lazy to find it but I know someone else will post it here though (deja vu).

But I think it'd be beneficial for others to see how it's done. Personally, since I don't have PS, I'm thinking I'm kinda spoiled. Once I've finished my chop (in GIMP) I save it as a full size, full quality, jpg file. Then I bring it into Fireworks to export/optimize the final entry file.

Fireworks optimation tools seem so intuitive:




Dropping the quality to 90% Gets me to 550x367 and 72.66 KB


Compared to the "Original" at 247.99KB

well it looks like you pretty much did it for me...

So yeah, follow Tofu's advice.

Or find a "save for web" tutorial. From the sounds of it, you weren't trying to optimize at all. You were just flattening the image and saving as a jpg.

Just go to File-Save for web (or ctrl-alt-shift-S) and mess around with the settings for a while to see what you get. Hit the "2-up" tab to compare the original with the optimized.

I'll put money on it that a 120k image can easily be dropped to 50-60k without a noticable difference in quality.

BTW...

203K down to 39k...

Ok guys Tofu and Dew, thanks I will try this on my next entry...Hope more people read this and learn from it, I did! thanks!